Roland Schimmelpfennig is one of the most performed German authors in the world, and his work has begun to emerge among us since the premiere of The Arabian Night (2006) at the Sala Beckett under the direction of Toni Casares. His theatre shuns conventional dramatic conventions and, consequently, explores new ways of explaining reality. He does so through a play of social and personal tensions within a hyper-fragmented and repetitive narrative, which illustrates very well the accelerated, nervous, almost convulsive nature of today's society. All of this is seasoned with corrosive humour. They are always demanding works for the performers but also for the spectators, confronted with a stage development where the information, scarce but sufficient, is admirably mixed with an often stark poetic lyricism where the characters elude logic.

The worship of beauty and narcissistic vanity are now very present in society through the world of social networks. You are as you are seen. And you must always be seen well. It's not about making a pact with the devil to preserve youth, but with personal trainers and cosmetic shops to groom yourself.

Tall, agile, well-built, attractive, furious, violent, histrionic, clownish. And without a hump. This is Shakespeare's Richard III as imagined by Calixto Bieito, which has been at the Grec Festival in a 2025 production by Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martín, starring actor Joaquín Furriel, whom Calixto Bieito had already directed in 2010 in a version of "Life is a dream of Calderón de la Barca.

It is easy to imagine the surprise of the playwright and director Lucía Carballal (Les Bàrbares, Los nuestros) when the National Classical Theatre Company (CNTC) commissioned her to write a text that would dialogue with the little-known work of Calderón de la Barca El Castillo de Lindabridis. It is a fantastic comedy in which a princess travels with a flying castle in search of a husband who will make her queen after her father's death. We must celebrate Carballal's talent and skill in this powerful and brilliant exercise of autofiction that speaks of helplessness and of inheritance, both emotional and physical, both material and immaterial.

Newton's first law is the scientific statement of the immobility of an object if there is no force pushing it. It happens with objects and also with our lives and with politics, because if there is no one pushing for real changes, things stay as they are.

All festivals are creative and playful spaces where very diverse proposals coincide that are difficult to see in the regular seasons of theaters. Differences that not only have to do with their artistic quality, but with the objective, with the capacity to produce emotions, to reflect ourselves and the society in which we live or even simply to entertain us, but also with the means of production to bring them to life and which often reflect other cultural and economic differences. It was only two days ago that the Fabià Puigserver hall of the Teatre Lliure received Florentina Holzinger, one of the stars of European radicality, with a show (Ophelia’s got talent) in which nothing was spared and where even a life-size helicopter appeared. And three days later in the small Espai Lliure a Mexican company brought us a simple but committed political view on the perversion of the capitalist system in Mexico, extensible throughout depressed societies in the line of what the writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano analyzed and denounced in Las venas abiertas de América Latina.My mother and money raises the difficulty, or almost the impossibility, for the lower classes outside the privileged West to access a dignified life, despite working tirelessly. This is the real case of Josefina Orlaineta, mother of actor and playwright Anacarsis Ramos. Why, at 66 years old and having worked all her life, does my mother live in poverty?, Ramos asks himself. And that's why he convinced her to explain her life experience with work and money. So, the enterprising Josefina added acting to her work history with more than forty commercial initiatives. And what ease she displays! As if she had been doing it all her life.

Romeo Castellucci is interested in the construction of the image and its manipulation with a strong aesthetic and often political component. An imaginary where the most theatrical fits, as we have seen in Bros (Temporada Alta) and the trilogy on the Divine Comedy by Dante and On the Concept of Face, in the Son of God (Festival Grec), but also in performative installations such as Il terzo Reich (Temporada Alta) or this Believing in Masks. The Italian artist creates a sequence of objects that enter and leave the pristine white space of the museum-like air of the Raval room of the CCCB, surrounded by spectators masked with different human masks. They are objects of a certain quotidian nature (a glass of milk, a bouquet of flowers, a jug, a photograph of Stan Laurel, a crucifix...) which he names with names that have nothing to do with them, exhibiting an impossible logic, since the series is designed for the final appearance of an electric chair like those used in the executions of condemned to death and which, now yes, is called by its name: chair. A chair very similar to Andy Warhol's famous screen print that may or may not provoke the reaction of the attendees. From mere observation to its use and finally its figurative destruction. Forty minutes of a visual poem very typical of contemporary art.

The title of the new proposal by Oriol Puig Grau, author of the celebrated Karaoke Elusia, I told the mystery behind the tarot cards. Specifically, this mystery refers to the Tower card, which is generally interpreted as divine wrath announcing catastrophe, chaos, and ruin. However, it can also have a positive meaning: to stir the person to get them out of their comfort zone and confront them with the world. The sixteenth number of the major arcana rises from the first interpretation. Oriol Puig Grau's work poses a kind of journalistic investigation into the history of an isolated house, struck by lightning. In the building, located on the outskirts of a town, youth used to raves, and it was inhabited by a mysterious Russian woman.

Florentina Holzinger is one of the most daring voices in European theatre with proposals that, given what we've seen in this Ophelia’s got talent, show influences of the radical theatre of La Fura dels Baus from a few years ago and parallels with the work of Angélica Liddell or the Brazilian Carolina Bianchi. But, in my opinion, they evoke, due to their content and dramaturgy, or rather their absence, the so-called American vaudeville theatre of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conveniently updated. A very popular entertainment in which, one after another, musical numbers, dance, acrobatics, fakirism, illusionism, humour, with audience participation, and even biological oddities introduced by a presenter are presented. These kinds of shows were adapted for television after the Second World War.

The strategy of using a well-known title as a hook in proposals centered around popular works is legitimate, but in the case of this A Midsummer Night's Dream I believe it is, above all, an act of honesty and recognition that Àlex Rigola's dramaturgy is indebted to Shakespeare's genius and Salvador Oliva's excellent translation, even though very little remains of both. Little, but fundamental. Because what Rigola has imagined is a dynamic, jovial, daring, and at the same time, very delicate performance about love, one of the themes – perhaps the main one – of the great bard's fairy comedy.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill conceived The Threepenny Opera in a specific context, Victorian London, and in a determined physical space, the underbelly of Soho, inhabited by traitors, murderers, prostitutes, and exploiters. The versions we have known among us — Mario Gas's, premiered at the Romea Theatre in 1984, and Calixto Bieito's, premiered precisely at the Grec Festival in 2002 — varied the context but maintained the physical space. Above all, they maintained the characteristics that define the characters (from stage presence to costume) and the brutality of the capitalist society they describe and satirize.

The new era of Teatre del Raval under the direction of Pep Tosar and Evelyn Arévalo is based on the premise of artistic excellence and humanistic commitment. This was evident in the magnificent inaugural show about Federico García Lorca, which just ended its run last Friday and has been succeeded by L’enterrador (The Gravedigger). It is a monologue written by Gerard Vázquez and performed by Pepe Zapata that has toured much of Spain and speaks of the Francoist mass graves through the true story of Leonci Badia Navarro, better known as the gravedigger of Paterna.

The Dawn focuses on the search for origins through memory: a journey of discovery from the Spanish Civil War to the Barcelona Olympic Games that mirrors itself unashamedly in Wajdi Mouawad's great epic, Incendis (against the backdrop of the endless wars in Lebanon) which Oriol Broggi directed at the Romea theatre fourteen years ago and which, as a curiosity, was advertised with exactly the same duration of The Dawn by Jaume Viñas; three hours and forty minutes, which finally reach almost four hours.

Mario Gas is an actor, a theatre and opera director, but also a zarzuela director (in January he will restage Los gavilanes at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid), a genre of musical theatre for which he has great affection and passion. This is not surprising if we consider that Mario Gas was born in Montevideo during the tour (of more than a year!) of his parents' company through Latin America. Hence the title of the show La nit és blanca, muy blanca..., which he premiered at La Fàbrica with the fragment of the romance Despierta negro from La tabernera del puerto by Maestro Sorozábal, which his father sang when he was born. A declaration of intent, moreover, playing with Catalan and Spanish in a show that looks back without nostalgia, evoking those poetic voices that have been part of his life.

Peeping Tom was a dance-theater company with two co-directors working together: the Argentine Gabriela Carrizo and the Frenchman Frank Chartier. It remains a dance-theater company, but each show is commanded by one of the two creators and founders. Two years ago we saw the most theatrical version of Peeping Tom at the Sala Gran of the TNC (S 62°58’, W 60°39’) where the physical, almost acrobatic dance that characterized the company's proposals, had practically disappeared.

I don't know if Jordi Oriol, one of the most original creators of Catalan theatre, knows the work of the linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure, but his theatre in general and in particular L'últim àtom make me think so, because he uses linguistic games that alter the meaning of signs and words, illustrating the principle of linearity of the signifier and achieving surprising and humorous results. This is evident, for example, in the pronunciation (the speech) of the title of the show if we connect the two words or, more naively, if we consider the presumed and unknown actress Lara Segur, with phonetics that recall the name and surname of another well-known actress, who will not appear on stage and will be replaced by a supposed director: the actor Rubèn Ametllé. There is much more on the old green blackboard of the language teacher Mia Esteve, who plays with signifiers and signifieds and who replicates the mathematical formulas of professor Joan Carreras on another blackboard, where, talking about quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat, she posits the principle of observation as an international virus that threatens humanity. The professor and teacher are separated parents of a daughter who disappeared ten years ago, whose anniversary is approaching. She is joined by a Spanish-speaking army general, a priest, a mother in a wheelchair, a police inspector, the mother's lover, a theatre student, and a president who doesn't arrive... characters who inhabit a well-posed story but not so well resolved in the construction of a dramaturgy that is a victim of the same flexible and intuitive structure with which it is presented to us.

Carme Riera won the Sant Jordi prize (2003) with La meitat de l'ànima, an intrigue novel for which Ramon Simó and Magda Puyo have created a very fluid stage version, overcoming the difficulties inherent in a highly literary story, linked to the anti-Francoism of the fifties and sixties and anchored in public figures such as writers Albert Camus and Jorge Semprún, the anarchist and maquis Quico Sabaté, and the leader of the Lliga and former minister of Alfonso XIII Josep Bertran Musitu, who are only references for generations who already comb white hair.

The mother and son who star in this Denmark by Lluïsa Cunillé, published in 2017 (Arola Editors) but written in 2014 — when the Spanish king abdicated to evade responsibilities with the Treasury—, are the author's classic everyday characters: nameless people who drag themselves through life expecting almost nothing from it. Cunillé mirrors them without explicitly stating it in Shakespeare's great tragedy, Prince Hamlet and his mother Gertrude. A mother and son in a humble little house in Copenhagen with a bourgeois theatre sofa in the middle and flies (something smells rotten). She sleeps in front of the television and the son arrives.

Here is a play that is a challenge both for the audience and for the British playwright Ella Hickson when she was commissioned by the Almeida Theatre in London to write a play with total freedom. Hickson took it very seriously, letting out the conflicts that, as a playwright, she has to face in a British theatrical system increasingly focused on profitable proposals that have little or no impact on the real world.

The bottles of Fanta lemon on the tables at the usual refreshment offered by the Lliure after premieres were very suitable for this school-like proposal well conducted by an empathetic Olga Onrubia, chorus leader and guide of an entertaining look at Sophocles' classic but lacking the necessary pathos. It is a proposal that Andrea Jiménez's direction has populated with occurrences with little dramatic justification, such as replacing the old blind Tiresias with a girl heir to his power of prediction, reducing the character of Eurydice to nothing, or treating an Ismene dressed by her worst enemy as an actress who doesn't know what play she's in.